The New York Times
Why childcare staff had to show up while teachers work remotely
NEW YORK – Last summer, when the city of New York suddenly delayed the start of personal classes, the Cypress Hills Child Care Corp. opened in Brooklyn right on schedule – complete with a spray balloon tied to the front door and festive music coming from a speaker. And when the entire public school system closed in November due to increasing virus cases, the state required the center and many other child care facilities across the city to remain open. ‘When we close a school, they do not even include us; we are always an afterthought, ‘says Maria Collier, who runs the center, which serves mostly low-income Latino students. “We were considered essential workers. But if teachers are in schools of the Department of Education, they were not essential workers. In recent years, some educators, school officials and union leaders in New York and across the country have declared that teachers are not childminders and that schools are not childcare centers. The sentiment is meant to convince the public that teachers should not be responsible for supervising children, just so that parents can work again. Sign up for The Morning Newsletter of the New York Times. Although some educators have been able to work from home for many, if not all of the pandemic, child care centers have emerged as substitute schools for thousands of American children available online. learning is not an option. The students have been under the supervision of childcare, aftercare and daycare staff for months – sometimes in the same classrooms that have been closed for personal instruction due to high virus cases and concerns among teachers’ unions about safety measures. This serious imbalance has underlined inequalities between childcare workers and educators of public schools, raising uncomfortable questions about which employees are considered essential. The excessive role that childcare providers played during the pandemic is an incentive for childcare workers, activists and some politicians to give childcare workers more protection, payment and power and to integrate childcare into the broader education system. Child care experts said they were encouraged that the U.S. rescue plan would include nearly $ 40 billion for the industry. “We treat public education as the public good it is, but we do not do it for childcare,” said Julie Kashen, director of economic justice for women, at the Century Foundation, a left-wing think tank. “We created this false divide between the two.” The rupture takes place in real time as the coronavirus vaccine is rolled out. President Joe Biden recently announced that all teachers and child care workers should be given preference for a shot before the end of March. This will be a change in Ohio, Kentucky, Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma, where educators have been eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine in front of child care workers. Even in the many states, including New York, where child care workers are preferred for the shot, some workers have struggled to be vaccinated. Child care workers in Washington, DC, initially did not get preference with teachers. “It is crucial – and fair – to provide vaccinations for the teachers and children who care for children, who have overcome their fears, put on their personal protection and turned up at work daily to make DC’s children essential, “writes Kristen Maxson, director of a kindergarten in Washington, in a petition urging the city to change its policy, which he did recently. In New York, Collier said there was no streamlined way for her employees to make appointments, while the United Federation of Teachers, which represents tens of thousands of teachers in New York, members match the available doses through agreements with local health care. suppliers. The UFT has a greater influence in city politics than the District Council 37, a larger union representing many child care workers, after-school workers and other essential workers, along with many officials who worked remotely during the pandemic. Many other childcare workers across the country – the majority of whom are non-white – are in unions that do not have the same political influence as unions, and many are not unions at all. Those dynamics, coupled with the difference in teaching rules, help explain why child care workers tend to earn significantly less money than public teachers. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers’ union representing about 100,000 child care workers along with teachers, said the past year has been a clear argument for a more robust union effort in the child care industry. “It is clear that we were not so successful, and that we were trying to unite the workers,” she said. “I think COVID has shown the absolute need for an effective childcare system across the country.” It also, according to Kashen, raised an awkward question for unions and school districts: “Who are we willing to endanger?” Part of the answer can already be found in how cities across the country have approached supervision of children who cannot learn at home, either because their parents have to work personally, or because distance education is too challenging. Teachers in San Francisco have been working remotely for a full year because public schools have virtually remained. Since last fall, about 500 aftercare staff and parks and recreation staff have supervised some of the city’s most needy students, including homeless children and foster care students, at nearly 80 so-called learning centers in the city. The staff members were given a new title that, according to their work, better reflects: “teachers and youth development front responders.” The description feels appropriate for Misha Olivas, program director at United Playaz, an after-school organization in San Francisco that already operates a large portion of the pandemic two hubs. The programs are from 08:30 to 17:30 and staff are responsible for helping students with their schoolwork, arranging outdoor activities and taking care of their emotional well-being. The hubs, along with many like them across the country, serve students at various grades, including high school students. “We saw our role as important,” Olivas said. But, she added, “It was a lot for our staff to juggle.” Members of her team of after-school staff functioned as personal educators, tutors, and therapists, and workers risked their own health and isolated themselves from family and friends. “Here we are a year later,” Olivas said, “and schools are still not open.” Before Washington, DC, reopened many of its schools in February, the district opened dozens of classrooms, mostly for children with disabilities and homeless students, under the supervision of aftercare workers or school support staff who returned voluntarily, rather than teachers. Chicago has operated learning hubs in classrooms and community centers for children who have not been able to stay home for the past year. And Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax, Virginia, have each hired hundreds of classroom monitors – some of which will not receive benefits – to supervise children who take online lessons from their classrooms while their teachers work remotely. When all 1,800 schools in New York City closed last March to slow the spread of the virus, the school turned school buildings into so-called regional enrichment centers for children of emergency medical workers. These centers were run primarily by members of District Council 37, although some teachers affiliated with UFT also volunteered. The centers were open longer than a regular school day and remained open on federal holidays to enable nurses, emergency medical technicians and other front-line staff to report to the overwhelming hospitals in the city. Some child care centers in the homes of providers also remained open during the pandemic, and many other child care programs were reopened during the summer, after brief attempts to teach toddlers at a distance. This was not because childcare workers in the city, many of whom earn only $ 15 an hour, were inherently more willing than teachers to risk their own health. Instead, child care centers had to remain open to stay afloat. Suppliers feared they would not be reimbursed by the state or federal government if they were temporarily shut down due to the virus. “When many teachers work remotely, many of our members came,” said Henry Garrido, president of DC 37. “Most of my members are colored people who have been hit the hardest by COVID,” he said. “They needed to be exposed to a lot more. Clearly, this puts our members at great risk. Garrido said about 200 of its members had died of COVID since the start of the pandemic, many of whom were childcare workers and school support staff as supervisors. The UFT lost 76 members. Garrido said some childminders have struggled to obtain personal protective equipment and that they often do not have information on safety measures and quarantine protocols shared with teachers. This is partly because it is difficult to coordinate the city’s childcare offerings, which are distributed among private homes, community-based centers and non-profit organizations, and public school classrooms. Melissa Caceres-Lazo, a kindergarten teacher at the Cypress Hills Center, said she is constantly worried about bringing the virus home to her older father. She and her colleagues are proud of their work at the center, she said especially over the past year. “We do it because we want to teach children,” she said. “When we’re here, we play all the roles: teachers, moms, friends.” But Caceres-Lazo said she did not understand why so many public school teachers were allowed to work from home while she was not. “If we do not come to work, we are not paid,” she said. “It was not a choice for me.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company